Hurray For The Riff Raff - Hurray For The Riff Raff

Sometimes the term ‘Americana’ doesn’t seem like a genre that we’d be terribly familiar with and its name alone almost suggests that it wouldn’t be a genre that would stand up in our country. But with its origins in folk and blues, we are in fact very much familiar with ‘Americana’ as a genre, and Hurray for the Riff Raff is indeed a perfect slice of everything you would consider the genre to be. Right down to the biography of the band. It reads;

Hurray For The Riff Raff began when a teenage Alyndra Lee Segarra started hopping freight trains across the USA to satisfy a yearning to explore its mythical small towns and backwaters…She hooked up with The Dead Man Street Orchestra, a home-made family of young, itinerant music makers living on the edge of the American dream.

That says it all really. The heart of this music is placed in the romantic dreams of turn of the century America with its wide, open plains barren save for the railroads and it’s sparsely populated towns.

It’s easy to be cynical about the foundation myth of the band, after all, I come from a very cynical country. However, once I put my cynical tendencies aside, what’s left behind is a beautiful body of music, spanning two albums, and five years of chasing the American dream. Well, in name at least.


The album opens with ‘Meet Me In The Morning’, a instrumental that sounds like it should accompany a love scene from a turn of the century silent film, and it leads into the album’s strongest song, ‘Is That You?’. Frontwoman, Alyndra, croons over banjo strums and the drones of an accordion, “I saw your ghost at the grocery” being the lead sentiment of the song. Toms and snare bang in and out, taking the track up and down as the accordion grows ever more frenzied.

In one of the dips of the song, Alyndra lifts a verse from the great, troubled singer Daniel Johnston and his song, ‘Some Things Last A Long Time’. She sings, “Your picture, is still, on my wall. The colours, are bright, as ever”. As a fan of Daniel Johnston, I’m happy to see his music influencing more musicians, and references to him seem to be a rite of passage, (see Kurt Kobain, Conor Oberst).

‘Is That You?’ is a beautiful start to an album, but sadly, the rest of the record stays in the same vein. Songs like Daniella, Little Things, and Take Me are quite lovely, and add to the atmosphere, but the album refuses to go anywhere new. Don’t get me wrong, Hurray For The Riff Raff is a marvelous album, beautifully crafted, and doesn’t possess a single disappointing song. But I feel that it’s more of a coffee table album, an album for the background that doesn’t require a lot of attention.

I will listen to this album again, as a fan of the Americana genre, and I will enjoy it. But not because Hurray For The Riff Raff have opened my mind up to something new, but because I’ve heard it all before.

Drop-D Rating: 8/10

Published on Drop-D.ie on April 20th 2011